Thursday, May 26, 2016

I took a mid-week day off from work yesterday, and drove out to Bodega Head to see if I could catch a glimpse of any of those whales that so many others have spotted this month in and around the San Francisco Bay Area. Humpback and blue whales were seen cavorting around in the bay itself, but off Bodega Head gray whales are more usually visible.

I arrived early enough to catch a bit of the low tide: sea anemone and mussels were packed like sardines on rock formations still exposed even a couple hours after the lowest tide of the morning (-0.1 according to NOAA). (Packed like sardines. Hmmm. That would be a truly terrible simile, except that the sea anemone do look a bit like rolled anchovy fillets. Alas, no one says "packed like anchovies.")

Some of the larger anemone were beginning to open again as the surf came in. Click the photo to see its fluorescent tentacles, enlarged -- a little cool, a little creepy...

Alas, the closest I got to seeing a whale was spotting a crab boat you can (barely) make out offshore in this photo:

And there was this turkey vulture (among many other birds):

And the flowers! April showers paid their May dividends this year: poppies, paintbrush, lupine, yarrow, and more:

When I visit the coast north of the San Francisco Bay I most often go to Point Reyes National Seashore in Marin County, usually to the north end of the preserve, Tomales Point. Bodega Head (in Sonoma County) is at the north end of Bodega Bay, and Tomales Point is at Bodega Bay's south end. So from where I stood yesterday, I could look south and see the tip of Tomales Point and the opening to Tomales Bay on its inner (east) side. In the photo below, the sharp end of the point is sticking out of the fog across Bodega Bay.

Even with binoculars, though, I didn't spot any of the elk who live on Tomales Point. I guess it wasn't my day for big mammals ... but a fine day nonetheless.

Tuesday, May 17, 2016

The text of the ordinance is not yet drafted, and may not ban coal at all: it may instead require mitigations that are unlikely to be achievable, enforceable, and/or effective in protecting the health of people who live near the proposed bulk terminal that developers hope to use to ship coal mined in Utah and slated for dirty combustion in Asia. The ordinance may or may not also address a ban on or mitigations for shipping crude oil, fuel oil, and gasoline.

To call the city's mayor, Libby Schaaf, and the councilmembers' attention to just how crazy-dangerous it would be to permit oil transport through a port surrounded by communities they were elected to protect and serve, No Coal in Oakland activist Michael Kaufman sent to Oakland's elected officials yesterday afternoon a partial list of tanker car spills and pipeline explosions that have occurred over the past three years.

Here's what Michael Kaufman wrote to Oakland's Mayor Schaaf, nine councilmembers, and city staffer Heather Klein:

Dear Ms Klein, Mayor and Council MembersPlease consider [this] list of tanker car spills of fossil fuels and other hazardous commodities that have been endangering our citizens in the last three years.These spills, explosions and pollution of neighborhoods and water ways will continue without end, until our elected leaders ban fossil fuels from being loaded or off loaded in our communities.Below is a very incomplete list of just some of the spills and explosions that have occurred in North America during the last three years. Oil pipeline capacity is maxed out in North American. Consequently oil rail car use has expanded forty fold from 2008.

The prior NTSB chair said that the overwhelming majority of oil train cars are not built to carry the toxic oil now being massively produced. The rules to control this form of oil transportation must be updated quickly; more quickly than is happening on the federal level.

The current rail cars for fossil fuel, DOT 111 type rail cars, are not crash resistant. This type of car is being banned and replaced in Canada but not in U.S. However some of the crashes and spills are also coming from newly designed, CPC-1232 type cars, which are supposed to be more crash resistant.

2/14/15 Timmons, Ontario 100-car Canadian National train carrying crude oil derailed. 30 cars caught fire. The tankers were the newer, CPC-1232, "safer" kind. The fires burned for days blocking a main rail line for three days.

5/6/15 Heimdal, ND another train blew up with 6 tankers carrying 180,000 gallons of Bakken Crude exploding. Heimdal was evacuated. Four separate fire department were dispatched and two Hazmat teams. The EPA is monitoring air quality. It is the fifth explosion in 2015 to date. This one was using the updated tanker cars, CPC-1232.

7/1/16 Maryville Tennessee just south of Knoxville, one CSX car derailed, broke an axle and punctured the tanker and sparked a huge fire, which burned for over a day. The car was carrying Acrylonitrile, used in making plastics.

When it burns it releases cyanide gas, which can be fatal. Evacuated a 2 mile radius, and 5,000 people. Ten cops were hospitalized due to exposure. 55 were hospitalized with 25 admitted to the hospital.

11/7/15 Alma Wisconsin 25 cars derailed and fell into the river with 20,000 gallons of ethanol spilled into the Mississippi River, highways closed, residents evacuated

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About Steve

I write fiction, take an activist interest in politics and culture, and work in information technology at UC Berkeley. My novel Consequence was judged Best General Fiction in the 2017 Green Book Festival competition; please visit my website for more info. ~Steve